Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986

Estate of the artist, 1986
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1987
Beltexan Galleries, Fort Worth, Texas, 1990
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1997
Hall Galleries, Dallas, Texas
Private Collection, Victoria, Texas, 1997 (acquired from the above)

New York, An American Place, Exhibition of Georgia O'Keeffe, January-March 1941, no. 9
Chicago, Illinois, The Art Institute of Chicago, Georgia O'Keeffe, January-February 1943, no. 58
Phoenix, Arizona, Phoenix Art Museum; Tokyo, Japan, Seibu Art Museum; Aspen, Colorado, Aspen Art Museum, Georgia O'Keeffe: Selected Painting, April 1988-February 1989, no. 29,  illustrated p. 70
Greenville, South Carolina, Greenville County Museum of Art, Georgia O'Keeffe, July-August 1993
London, England, The Lefevre Gallery, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), April-May 1993, no. 16
San Antonio, Texas, McNay Museum of Art, O'Keeffe and Texas, January-April 1998, no. 30, illustrated in color p. 71

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, New Haven, Connecticut, 1999, no. 986, p. 622, illustrated in color

In 1940, Georgia O’Keeffe purchased her first home, Ranchos de los Burros, in New Mexico.   She had been visiting Taos every summer since 1929 but she decided upon the remote village of Abiquiu to settle and set up her studio.   Lloyd Goodrich writes, “Near the village of Abiquiu she found an adobe house in the Ghost Ranch, a wild area far in from any road, facing south toward the Pedernal, an old volcanic peak with a flat top, and north toward a range of high sheer rock cliffs” (Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 1970, p. 21). According to Jan Garden Castro, O’Keeffe’s adobe house at Ghost Ranch, “felt more like home than any place she had ever lived” (The Art & Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 1985, p. 110).  O’Keeffe transformed the residence into her studio, installing large windows and placing a ladder on the side of the house, allowing the artist to climb onto the roof and fully view the majestic mountains and canyons surrounding her.  Located on a deserted road away from the main ranch, O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch abode enabled her to paint the imposing views of Pedernal Mountain, the vast desert, and the red-orange cliffs of New Mexico in a highly personal environment.

Patio No. I was painted during that first summer at Ghost Ranch and depicts the side of Ranchos de los Burros.  O’Keeffe captures her adobe house with the colors of the surrounding landscape-juxtaposing white washed walls with a deep earth red roof and yellow ochre outlines set against a deep blue cerulean sky. The wooden beams in the roof cast deep shadows on the white walls in a geometric rhythm.  Sharyn R. Udall writes, “New Mexico’s flat roofed adobe architecture gave O’Keeffe another way of painting the country.  The simple cubes of buildings, with proportions often dictated by materials, appealed to O’Keeffe’s long-standing reductivist taste while providing many opportunities for her to continue her investigation of geometric patterning.  In 1940, the year she purchased a home at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, she painted From the Patio I, an asymmetrical fragment of wall, conspicuous like Lake George Window for its tight execution and controlled relational rectangles.  It is also a progeny of her San Antonio composition Window—Red and Blue Sill: again, the window is the focal point, but at Ghost Ranch its gridded form contains a complex reflection from an adjacent wall.  O’Keeffe would refine this spare geometry for nearly a half-century in New Mexico” (O’Keeffe and Texas, p. 61).